Congressman Tonko announces funding to help Union College collect and analyze intelligence

Congressman Paul Tonko recently announces the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) release of funding for a project at Union College entitled “Collaborative Research: Measuring and Modeling Collective Intelligence.” This project would attempt to use vast computer networks to create new kinds of intelligent entities that combine the best of both human and machine intelligence. A key to this human-centered computing system is finding a better way to measure the collective intelligence they exhibit.

“This program is a great example of some of the cutting edge research going on in our colleges and universities and represents the kind of bold ideas and innovation that will lead to future scientific discoveries,” said Rep. Tonko. “I commend the work of Union College in attempting to compile this information to understand and solve some of the most complex systems of data and intelligence. Ultimately the solutions discovered in Schenectady will enable us to solve some of the most difficult and complex problems we face.”

Such a system seeks to provide powerful tools for managing and designing intelligence systems. The idea is to provide a collective test of intelligence to groups such as management teams to predict their future performance on a wide range of tasks. The test could then suggest changes the team could make to improve flexibility or effectiveness. People and computers are poised to solve problems together both in an efficient and intelligent manner.

The Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at NSF has provided Union College with $173,908.00 to carry out this research over the next three years, in collaboration with MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. It will also have key implications for computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, social psychology and organization theory.